1. The Cruxshadows strike again!

    14 September 2007

    Heartfelt congratulations to the Cruxshadows for striking the music world like a bolt of lightning - they've taken the #1 position on the Hot Singles Dance Chart once again and are at #2 on the Hot Singles Sales Chart with the release of Birthday, their second single from the album Dreamcypher.

    On top of that, the single Sophia has re-entered the Dance Singles Chart again at the #3 position, thus sayeth the Dancing Ferret Discs website.

    Congratulations, guys.

    ObDisclaimer: Some of the above links go to my Amazon Associates account.

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  2. I see no C-walk here.

    14 September 2007

    MC Frontalot is at it again, this time celebrating the release of his new nerdcore hip-hop album, Secrets From the Future. In fact, he's released his first music video, a silly little ditty called It Is Pitch Dark, a tribute to classic pieces of interactive fiction lke Zork and The Lurking Horror. It's goofy. It takes place in someone's basement. MC Frontalot dances better than I do. It's all good.

    If you can't reach Youtube for some reason, go to MC Frontalot's homepage, where you can download the video in a number of other formats (including the .mp3 of the …

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  3. Bastille Linux domain hijacked by domain squatter; project renamed, relocated.

    13 September 2007

    Some time on Monday, the Bastille Linux project was notified that someone had hijacked their domain, namely, a domain squatter named Mykhaylo Perebiynis who is willing to return use of the domain name for the paltry sum of $10kus. The official announcement can be read here. However, because the Bastille security system has been running on more than just Linux for a few years now (vis a vis HP-UX and Mac OSX), Jay Beale has decided to rename the project to Bastille Unix and acquire a new domain name while his lawyers fight it out with Perebiynis.

    Beale is also …

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  4. A first step toward exotic matter?

    13 September 2007

    Scientists at the University of California-Riverside physics lab have created under laboratory conditions a most unusual form of matter: Positronium in molecular form, which is composed of discrete molecules of electron-positron (anti-electron) pairs.

    Now, why they're calling these molecules I have to wonder - technically they'd be an exotic and rare form of atom and not molecule (because molecules are made up of multiple atoms). Maybe the reporter got his or her facts wrong. Still, this is definitely a breakthrough in particle physics because it represents a stable (for a couple of seconds, at least) axis of matter and antimatter in …

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  5. The Pixies almost had it right.

    12 September 2007

    Yesterday wasn't so much a wave of mutilation as it was a stormfront of WTF sweeping across the land. While I can't really put my finger on any one trigger event that caused yesterday to go west in a serious way, I can outline more or less what happened. First off, the hard drive in my workstation at the office decided to pack it in while I was working on something, which turned the rest of the day into a mad dash to find a new drive and rescue everything that I could. Finding a replacement drive took somewhere around …

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  6. The FBI's data mining program took a mile when it was given an inch. Film at eleven.

    11 September 2007

    A number of lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation have confirmed what people have been saying since the get-go, which is that the FBI's telecommunications data mining program went far beyond what it was supposed to (login/password required, bugmenot.com will hook you up). It's well known and documented that the US government's been leaning on telecommunication companies all across the country (and a few rolled over and bared their throats without even being ordered) to provide them with lists of names and numbers of their customers so that who called whom …

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  7. National Security Letters found unconstitutional last week.

    11 September 2007

    Last calendar week something unusual happened in the US court system: The sections of the USA PATRIOT Act that made it far easier to get National Security Letters were declared unconstitutional (specifically, they violate the First Amendment rights of US citizens) by federal Judge Victor Marrero. National Security Letters, or NSLs, are official documents written up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation which can be used to demand sensitive information, such as personnel dossiers, telephone or Internet usage information, and financial history information without having to go on the record by requesting a search warrant from the court system. These …

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  8. They let me sit in the cockpit of an F-18!

    07 September 2007

    Earlier today I was gifted with a unique experience that I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd ever do, much less squee like a rabid fangirl over - I got a tour of the hangar and they let me sit in the cockpit of an F-18 in the facility's air fleet. With the permission of my PoC and the hangar chief, I was allowed to bring my camera in and be photographed while sitting in the (very tiny) cockpit of a fully operational F-18 jet. First off, I had to remove everything that might possibly fall out of my pockets …

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